Wednesday, October 27, 2004

The RDX Problem Resolves Itself

A little more data for the RDX pot. Whatever the MSNBC embeds saw with the
101st, the 3ID which preceded them saw more. It searched Al Qa Qaa and found
suspicious material
Instapundit
finds this reference in
CBS via the
Captain's Quarters.

April 4, 2003. CBS News National Security Correspondent David Martin
reports that the hunt for weapons of mass destruction continues at sites where
the U.S. thought chemicals weapons might be hidden. "And although there are no
reports of actual weapons being found, there are constant finds of suspicious
material," Martin said. "It obviously will take laboratory testing to find out
exactly what that powder is." U.S. troops found thousands of boxes of white
powder, nerve agent antidote and Arabic documents on how to engage in chemical
warfare at an industrial site south of Baghdad. But a senior U.S. official
familiar with initial testing said the materials were believed to be
explosives. Col. John Peabody, engineer brigade commander of the 3rd Infantry
Division, said the materials were found Friday at the Latifiyah industrial
complex just south of Baghdad.

... The facility had been identified by the International Atomic Energy
Agency as a suspected chemical, biological and nuclear weapons site. U.N.
inspectors visited the plant at least nine times, including as recently as
Feb. 18. The facility is part of a larger complex known as the Latifiyah
Explosives and Ammunition Plant al Qa Qaa. The senior U.S.
official, based in Washington and speaking on condition of anonymity, said the
material was under further study. The site is enormous and U.S. troops are
still investigating it for potential weapons of mass destruction, the official
said. "Initial reports are that the material is probably just explosives, but
we're still going through the place," the official said. Peabody said troops
found thousands of boxes, each of which contained three vials of white powder,
together with documents written in Arabic that dealt with how to engage in
chemical warfare.

The contemporaneous CBS report, written before anyone knew al Qa Qaa would be
a big deal, establishes two important things. The first is that 3ID knew it was
looking through an IAEA inspection site. The second was that the site had shown
unmistakable signs of tampering before the arrival of US troops. "Peabody
said troops found thousands of boxes, each of which contained three vials of
white powder, together with documents written in Arabic that dealt with how to
engage in chemical warfare." Now presumably those thousands of boxes were not
all packaged and labeled with chemical warfare instructions under IAEA
supervision, so the inescapable conclusion is that a fairly large and organized
type of activity had been under way in Al Qa Qaa for some time. It is important
to reiterate that these are contemporaneous CBS reports which were filed no with
foreknowledge of the political controversy to come.

Michael Totten wonders why "there is no mention of 380 tons of HDX and RDX".
Perhaps the reason the RDX isn't mentioned can be found via a link through
Josh Marshall, quoting NBC's Jim Miklaszewski. (Hat tip reader
Trebbers in Comments)

Following up on that story from last night, military officials tell NBC
News that on April 10, 2003, when the Second Brigade of the 101st Airborne
entered the Al QaQaa weapons facility, south of Baghdad, that those troops
were actually on their way to Baghdad, that they were not actively involved in
the search for any weapons, including the high explosives, HMX and RDX. The
troops did observe stock piles of conventional weapons but no HMX or RDX. And
because the Al Qaqaa facility is so huge, it's not clear that those troops
from the 101st were actually anywhere near the bunkers that reportedly
contained the HMX and RDX. Three months earlier, during an inspection of the
Al Qaqaa compound, the International Atomic Energy Agency secured and sealed
350 metric tons of HMX and RDX. Then in March, shortly before the war began,
the I.A.E.A. conducted another inspection and found that the HMX stockpile was
still intact and still under seal. But inspectors were unable to inspect
the RDX stockpile and could not verify that the RDX was still at the compound.

Here we discover the rather important fact that the UN inspectors hadn't
actually seen the RDX in their final inspections. They just assumed it was there
because the seals were intact. So let's put it all together. The UN inspectors
conduct their final inspection before OIF without actually having seen the RDX.
The 3ID reach the site on April 4, 2003, know they are looking at an IAEA site
and find thousands of white boxes which they suspect may be chemical weapons.
The boxes are labeled with chemical warfare instructions. On April 10, the
Second Brigade of 101st Airborne arrives with press embeds. They look around but
press on with their main combat mission. From this the NYT comes to the
conclusion that the RDX was lost after the US assumed custody of the
site. It is worthwhile to reiterate the NYT's key assertions. In their article
of October 25, the
Times said:

The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American
military control but is now a no man's land, still picked over by looters as
recently as Sunday. United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the
explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge
that the explosives vanished sometime after the American-led invasion last
year.

It turned out that White House and Pentagon officials had acknowledged no
such thing. The next day, the
NYT reported:

White House officials reasserted yesterday that 380 tons of powerful
explosives may have disappeared from a vast Iraqi military complex while
Saddam Hussein controlled Iraq, saying a brigade of American soldiers did not
find the explosives when they visited the complex on April 10, 2003, the day
after Baghdad fell. But the unit's commander said in an interview yesterday
that his troops had not searched the facility and had merely stopped there for
the night on their way to Baghdad. The commander, Col. Joseph Anderson, of the
Second Brigade of the Army's 101st Airborne Division, said he did not
learn until this week that the site, known as Al Qaqaa, was considered highly
sensitive, or that international inspectors had visited there shortly before
the war began in 2003 to inspect explosives that they had tagged during a
decade of monitoring.

In the light of the unearthed contemporaneous CBS report, the NYT's use of an
interview with the Col. Anderson is totally worthless. They interviewed the
wrong unit commander. It was a 3ID outfit that searched the place with the
intent of discovering dangerous materials nearly six days before. The 101st had
no such mission. Moreover, the NYT's innuendo that "the huge facility, called Al
Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American military control but is now a no man's
land, still picked over by looters as recently as Sunday. United Nations weapons
inspectors had monitored the explosives for many years ..." suggests a
well-manicured facility that had been run to seed by knuckle-dragging American
incompetence after faithful care by the IAEA. It totally ignores the disorderly
condition in which 3ID found it, where, if the NYT correspondents had been
present, they might have taken home their own boxes "with three vials of white
powder, together with documents in Arabic that dealt with how to engage in
chemical warfare" -- surely a sign it was untampered with, unless the NYT wishes
to assert the contrary and thereby destroy their own case.

Incidentally, the condition of Al Qa Qaa is yet more indirect proof of the
redeployment of war materiel which took place under the cover of UN obstruction,
most notably by barring 4ID from attacking south through Turkey into the Sunni
Triangle, which was the subject of Belmont Club's
War Plan Orange.